This is actually due to a failure to confront reality. Within religious ministries, parishioners are believed to act in good faith as if it was a property of having faith, which means volunteers and youth ministers are not vetted in any way, nor are they trained in how to engage children, adolescents and young adults. Considering they serve as counselors that can be trusted with intimate subjects, some of the conditions that lead to inappropriate relationships are baked into the position.

Teachers and counselors in schools have to go through at least four years of schooling and training in order to teach and engage kids (and we still see teachers inappropriately engaging their students despite layers of regulations).

And then religious ministries are especially prone to secrecy, wanting to preserve a reputation free of scandal even if it means withholding justice and silencing victims, which is why victims of abuse or sexual assault are discouraged from contacting external authorities or law enforcement, but ministry services who immediately activate the legal team in response.

It most religious ministries – not just the Roman Catholic Church, and the major Protestant churches – youth pastor programs are a hotbed for child predators. Doubly so since their job is already to council kids in bad faith, rather than exclusively seeking what might be best for their disciples, youth pastors are directed to guide them in the interests of the ministry, making it even a shorter step to taking advantage of them and the intimacy for personal gratification.

This is actually a part of a bigger-picture problem that while our societies don’t like seeing our children suffer from abuse, we also don’t take children’s welfare matters seriously, and here in the States we just refuse to acknowledge children contending with puberty becoming interested in sexuality, preferring instead to ignore them until they are caught in flagrante delicto, at which point we punish or imprison them, which informs how we end up with the alt-right becoming V8 warboys seeking to serve white power and christian nationalism all shiny and chrome.

And that’s above and beyond letting kids go hungry and indoctrinating them towards serving plutocratic vanity interests as cheap laborers and soldiers.